


History is a Fiction

by rainer76



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Gen, Guilt, PTSD, post season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 07:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6145642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/rainer76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Fuck off,” she answers, and resolves to fall deeper into slumber. She knows it’s a dream, in the way that sleepers sometimes do.</p><p>“I bet it didn’t take much, to convince dear old mum to have a go at me, to stab me with those scissors. Family heirloom by the way, those scissors were. Antique. Figures those were the things she’d pack and cherish from England. Did you know, before the blood loss, and the perforation of a perfectly good shirt I might add, I honestly thought she was there for reconciliation.” He sounds peeved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	History is a Fiction

“Did it take much convincing?” He asks.

The streetlight renders the room in shades of mauve, midnight blue, the ambient background noise is abrasive, the toot of car-horns, the sounds of a domestic fuelled by hot weather and too much drink. Summer has arrived to Hell’s Kitchen with a vengeance, short tempered and sticky.

Jessica opens her eyes. She’s dressed in a three-day-old singlet and fresh knickers (thank you), lying atop the covers with the window blown wide open. She fell asleep trying to tempt the breeze into the room and she stirs now at the sound of his query. Neat, he sits at the end of her bed, one thigh crossed over the other like a proper gentleman. He’s dressed in his habitual suit and vest, his smile a cutlass. Kilgrave wore layers, singlet under a dress shirt, heavy woollen vest under a suit jacket, great coat, gloves, scarf around the neck, the overall bulk gave him the illusion of being averaged sized but he was slim under the attire, Jessica knew, a slight torso and bonier hips, she knew the topography of his body, the same way she knew the give of his neck - the moment when she snapped it in half - the way Jessica clamped his jaw shut between her fingertips and the look in Kilgrave’s eyes, the stuttered moment of realisation, before it was chased by fear. She knew the skeleton frame of him.  “Fuck off,” she answers, and resolves to fall deeper into slumber.

She _knows_ it’s a dream, in the way that sleepers sometimes do.

“I bet it didn’t take much, to convince dear old mum to have a go at me, to stab me with those scissors. Family heirloom by the way, those scissors were. Antique. Figures the silverware was the first thing she’d pack and cherish from England. Did you know, before the blood loss, and the perforation of a perfectly good shirt I might add, I honestly thought she was there for reconciliation?”  He sounds peeved.

When Jessica was under his control, Kilgrave could have killed her with a thought, a snide command. Ironic then, that after surviving his presence for over a year, his ghost is going to do Jessica in from rising blood pressure, no less.

She stares at the ceiling, at the spider web crack running from the cornices and refuses to engage. Birch street, Higgins drive, Cobalt lane have given way to a brand new litany, and it goes along the lines of this: _he is dead, goddammit, do not engage with your subconscious, dream, or weird ass version of heat stroke!_

“I thought she meant it,” Kilgrave says, forlornly. “Still, every good turn deserves another.”   _Stab yourself, for every year you were gone._

“She volunteered,” Jessica says. “Your mother heard their stories, went to the meetings, she listened to every act you committed. She didn’t need convincing to stab you, she wanted to do it, to walk into the cell and provoke you…it was the only way to make you _do_ something in front of the camera.”

“Oh, Jessica. Sweet guilt?”

“Yours, not mine. She didn’t love you. You certainly didn’t love her, your reunion wouldn’t have changed anything long term.” It would have been fine if not for Hogarth, it would have worked if not for the break in the electrical current, before it went so terribly wrong. “You both deserved an Oscar that night.”

Kilgrave turns his head to look at her. “I wasn’t acting. I don’t act,” he says, indignantly. “Why bother? I just do.”

He had the worse poker face Jessica had ever encountered, and she bites back the retort, blinks hard at the ceiling because Kilgrave didn’t hide his emotions, not his boredom or cruelty, not his obsession or his disdain, not his twisted, demented, fucked up version of want…not those rare moments of giddiness either.   _It’s true, isn’t it? I know.  I **know,** Jessica, in time you will feel the same way as I do. Now, then, how about a smile?  _ He didn’t know how to act and she’s tired of this subconscious rewind, of rummaging through the garbage cans, the detritus of planted evidence, of the way he had fallen into the curve of his mother’s body, the break in his voice. _I’m sorry I hurt you, mum._ She’s tired of second guessing every move she made, if the body count would have been less, more, if Jessica had made an alternate choice.

There have been a hundred articles written since Kilgrave died, they bandy words like mind control, rape, disconnection, but she thinks they’re wrong on one crucial element, Kilgrave was emotionally aware, or rather he was emotionally intelligent, he wouldn’t have been as good at manipulating her if he weren’t. I do have feelings, he would argue, but nobody else’s ever mattered to him.

“I hate your accent, your voice,” Jessica says, to her spectre. “You’ve ruined the entirety of Great Britain for me.”

“Well, there’s holding a grudge and then there’s _that.”_ He counters, amused.

She wakes up to the sound of her mobile alarm, to the familiarity of a glass clattering across her dresser-table when she slaps a hand out blindly. “Son of a bitch,” she curses, when the whiskey tumbler topples and stains her pillow piss-yellow. It splashes across her wrist. Awake, the room is no longer tinted purple but bright under the relentless glare of midday heat. Jessica peels her clothes off and stands under the shower, the cold water runs in fits and spurts, it trails luke-warm fingers down her spine, pools at her feet.

Jessica tips her forehead to rest against the tiles.

“There’s no grave deep enough.”

 

 

 

Once upon a time it used to be sense memory, the feel of his tongue across her cheek, the proximity of his body invading her personal space; since Kilgrave’s permanent death Jessica hears his voice instead, entire conversations run through her mind. Jessica thought killing him would invoke peace, would make things better; not drive her to the brink of insanity.

She’s tallying costs, all the people who were hurt, the feel of Hope choking in her arms, Louise, Albert, house-holders and neighbours; perfect strangers Jessica had barely met, those patients who died on the operating table, when surgeons walked out of the O.R in order to hunt Jessica through the corridors of a hospital. At her lowest point, Jessica wonders if she ought to have stayed in her childhood home, committed herself to teaching Kilgrave - rehabilitating him - and then the fury descends like a solar flare, scorching earth, and she’s livid all over again. Because that’s what people do, tell little girls it’s their responsibility to make men better, the paradigm of beauty and the beast, to support, give emotional stability.  They tell little girls they can make men _more_  (better) by cutting out chunks of themselves, lessening their own wants, and fuck that shit because Jessica isn’t a little girl. Men are responsible for their own emotional acts, the same way women are responsible for their own emotional acts, and Kilgrave doesn’t get a free pass for acting like an imbecile because someone didn’t _show_ him better.

_He should have wanted to be better by himself._

And if that accord doesn’t exist internally to begin with, then it’s not Jessica’s duty to teach him. She has her own life to lead, and unlike the insidious whisper spoken to little girl’s the world over, _Jessica’s own life - her own welfare - is just as important as any man’s._

In the end, Jessica’s decision to drug Kilgrave, drag him to the black site, hunt his parents down when none of her coercion worked and ask for Louise’s help came from one sentence. How am I supposed to know? The most blindingly stupid counter-argument Jessica had ever heard because the answer was pre-school simple. Ask, you dumbass, you take thirty seconds out of your day and ask.

By the end of the afternoon Jessica’s mood has gone from bad to foul, a de facto relationship goes up in flames when a man douses his girlfriend in gas at the petrol station and sets her alight in front of eyewitnesses. She’s ready to declare men the incarnate of evil except the next day a thirty five year old women tries to poison her mother for the family inheritance and Jessica’s balance in the scales evens out again. No. It really is just humanity that’s a big stinking pile of horse-shit and not gender specific at all.

Jessica tries. She asks the questions. Seeks the answers. She tries to see people for who they are, stupid, messy, a migraine in the perpetual making. When she sleeps the following day Kilgrave is waiting for her.  “You could have helped me,” he says. “I would have listened to you...  I had no choice but to listen to you, even when I didn't like what you had to say. Once upon a time...I would have done anything for you.” He’s lost his bespoke suit. He looks like he did in the sin bin, imminently touchable, deranged.  "Luckily that's all blown over now.  Mostly, I fantasise about gutting you slow."

“Cut the crap.”  He wavers, reforms, layers upon layers between himself and the real world, unaffected by the New York heat in his English tweed. Kilgrave’s hair is too high, blown to the left and off his temple in a wave of brown. “You look like a creep.” Jessica mutters to this familiar image. She’s thinking about Hope, nineteen years old and on an athletic scholarship, the way Hope had been splayed on the bed for Jessica to find. Hope pregnant.   “A forty-odd year old paedophile preying on teenagers.”

“Remind me why I liked you again?”

“Damned if I ever knew.”

They glare at each other.

“People write their own histories, you know, remake their past, add details and erase others until it’s delectable. Until you can taste it, savour it. Like you and your family. Still got feelings for the dead brother, I see. _He was such a great kid.”_ Kilgrave mocks, derisively. “You think tying a sibling to a tree and walking away from him is normal behaviour?  The past impacts the present, it distorts the future, I think you know my parents lied to you. _I gave you evidence._ _They_ told you a story. Who was easier to believe, I wonder? Them? The virtuous parents? There was a time I would have done whatever you asked. I wanted to know what a real life was like, having someone to refute me, to  _talk to me_ , and you were my only option. My inevitable salvation.  Jessica Jones, orphan hero, with a brother she hated and can't admit too, because of the useless, worthless, guilt.  Little brother's her re-written history.”

“Yeah," Jessica interrupts, harshly.  "There’s that revisionist crap you spoke about. You didn’t _want_ someone to argue with you, or to have a normal human conversation with. You wanted to 'up' your power-level, you wanted me under your thumb again.  You think I magically forgot the pier, asshole?”

He grins at her and his image flickers, his skin darkens, like a vein under the skin, pulsing purple. Kilgrave shrugs. “In my defence, the top up was only necessary when it became obvious you were intent on killing me. Self-preservation; let’s say it’s a thing.”

“Like a cockroach.”

As in any dream, Kilgrave’s image keeps wavering, liquid changes until he’s dressed like she’s never seen him before, too casual in jeans and a jumper, with a scarf secure around his throat, stubble dark on his cheek, hair no longer coiffed. He taps his forefinger against his bottom lip. “The last batch dad created did make some rapid changes though, range, reach, quicker to heal as well, which was a pleasant surprise given the outcome of the day.” Jessica stills. In her dream her body goes heavy, stuck in a quagmire of uneasy horror, Kilgrave muses conversationally. “Did you think to have me cremated afterward?”

They took the body away so fast.  But she has the evidence, or had it, Jessica dumped the urn, the remaining ash, in the nearest trash bin.

Leaning forward he adds with the faintest smile:  "Tell me, dear Jessica, did you _see_ it?"

Like a nightmare, Jessica - automatically -  says: “No.”


End file.
